“Mundasupatti”… Light camera action

Mundasupatti, directed by Ram, is filled with wry little gags. It’s set in the 1980s, so it’s inevitable that we are treated to Ilayaraja’s hits. One of them, Mudhal mudhalaaga kaadhal duet paada vandhene, plays on the radio next to Gopi (Vishnu Vishal, in an endearingly dopey shag) after he falls for Kalaivaani (Nandita). He’s woozy-eyed. He has that foolish grin that people often have when they’re in love and they begin to dream. And so we slip into a reverie where he’s transported from his two-bit photo studio – grandly named Hollywood Studio – to her house, where she accepts his marriage proposal and sits shyly beside him. Then, when a villager barges in, she panics. She looks at Gopi and, wishing to distance herself from their recent arrangement, utters that shocking swear word that no lover wants to hear. She calls him… anna. The spell is broken. We’re back at Hollywood Studio, where the radio now plays Malargalai pol thangai urangugiraal.

It’s a slight, silly joke, and it fits in with this slight, silly film that’s set in a village where photography is banned. The locals think that exposure to the camera will pull down the shutter on their very existence – hence the only pictures on the walls are those of the dead. As for the reason, we have a backstory about an Englishman, an asteroid, an ill-timed plague – and we arrive at the root of Mundasupatti’s problems. The film is drawn from a sharp short made by the director, and it groans with excess baggage, the way Pannaiyaarum Padminiyum, another short that became a feature, did. Why did Kaadhalil Sodhappuvadhu Eppadi, also expanded from a short, make a fairly smooth transition to screen? Probably because of its generic rom-com roots. That is as elastic a genre as can be found, and the travails of a couple in love present infinite possibilities to the imaginative filmmaker. But when the short is based on a quirky conceit – a village that has banned photography; a man who treats his car like a loved one – the strain shows over two-and-a-half hours.

The story is no longer just about a photographer who’s summoned to a village to take a picture of the chieftain who’s about to depart to that great darkroom in the sky. It’s also about Gopi’s romance, which has nothing new to offer. We get scenes with Kalaivaani in school and, when she’s pulled out and asked to marry someone, there are redundant scenes with a third wheel. Seeing the short, we see how narrative economy can get compromised when there’s more time to fill. There, the struggling actor named Muniskanth (Ramdoss, pulling off just the right amount of swagger) came to Hollywood Studio only when he was needed, and his presence planted a crazy idea in the heads of Gopi and his assistant Azhagu (the winning Kaali Venkat). But here, we also have a long scene, earlier, where Muniskanth arrives and introduces himself. It’s a great shot – he comes in a rickshaw and the camera practically circumnavigates his (imagined) awesomeness, like a devotee orbiting his deity. But it’s just flab.

I wish more had been done with the central conceit. There’s a terrific running gag about a slutty housewife whose husband wants her dead – naturally, he asks Gopi to “shoot” her – and the visual joke about Gopi’s bike, surely the world’s slowest, being used as a clothesline is priceless. But the bits about the vampire haunting the village seem forced, as does the stretch about a director named Steven Spiel Kumar who’s even better than T Rajendar – he handles all 64 departments of filmmaking, and also plays the hero and heroine. (Sean Roldan’s rollicking score makes us feel we’re watching a film that’s funnier than it actually is.) And the subplot involving the local deity seems endless. This is not a lazy film by any stretch. There’s a surprising detour involving cats that veers into surrealism. But a comedy should be light on its feet. Linger too much, and it can begin to seem out of focus.

Vijayakumar: It’s difficult to define what a “good music score” is — in the sense that this is art and you cannot have “rules.” But in terms of what works for me, I’d say that a music score is something that helps in adding mood/momentum (in the case of comedies or action scenes) or in making emotions explicit (in dramas). The latter is where most problems in our films arise IMO.

The three most important people when it comes to filmmaking are the director, the screenwriter and the editor. (Of course, the producer who funds the whole thing is the most important person, but I am talking about the creative aspect.)

A director and his writer are important BEFORE the movie is shot, in terms of coming up with a strong script and characterisation, in ensuring that the narrative momentum builds up, and that the dialogues work well – and so forth.

So now the film is shot and you get the rushes.

And this is when the director/editor combination comes into play. They have to choose the best takes, etc., and make sure that they have a flowing piece of cinema, if an actor has wordlessly done something that makes a scene in the script redundant then removing this scene — and so forth.

It is this edited version that the music director gets, and IMO, his job is to make sure that he doesn’t re-state the obvious but help in making the implicit explicit. Unlike a novel, a film doesn’t have passages that describe emotion, and in a drama, a music director can bridge this gap, the way someone like Ilayaraja so often did.

A (bad and hastily written 🙂 ) novelistic version of “Guna” would perhaps read like this:

The abducted woman runs to the building, hoping that there’s someone out there. But when she reaches there, she finds that it’s an abandoned church… A little later, as she stands in the doorway, light from a stained-glass panel falls on her, and this radiance convinced Guna of her divinity. He is awestruck. He is now convinced that the thing he wanted more than anything is within reach…

Now, however good Kamal is, he can only summon up the “awestruck” part of what he’s feeling. How do we, the audience, know about the “divinity” aspect? Through the score — which “tells” us WHAT about this woman is making this man awestruck.

[Aside 1: Of course, there’s a cultural aspect to this. A foreigner seeing this film may not get this “divinity” aspect from the score because the sounds that Raja uses are our temple sounds, primal sounds that we know from our hymnals and so forth. But at least to an Indian audience, this score does what a score should do — communicate INNER emotions that an actor cannot.]

[Aside 2: an actor from an older generation may have still managed to communicate all this by quivering lips and clasping his hands together and saying “thaaye” and prostrating himself before her, etc. — I’m speaking about a modern-day context when actors are supposed to be more restrained.]

This, to me, is a great example of how background music should function in a film. (You can say the same about a lot of Raja films, say, the stretch in “Moondram Pirai” where Kamal packs Sridevi off to wear a sari and dreams that she’s become a woman… The score brilliantly brings out the yearning romance in his heart.)

“Guna” has another scene where Kamal is wailing (when he discovers his mother is not dead, which is what he’s been told in order to get him out of the hospital) — and this high drama (which plays out in front of our eyes) already tells us what the emotions at play are. And yet, Raja forces a wailing violin on top of all this. This, to me, is redundant.

[Aside 3: I am talking about naturalistic films. If a film is stylised in a different way, then the BG score will be stylised too.]

[Aside 4: Speaking of Raja, I think he has done such major work in making rotten films at least somewhat watchable that filmmakers have come to take it as some sort of mantra that “re-recording is the thing that infuses life to a movie.” What Raja was doing was salvaging these films. But that has trickled down today to lazy filmmaking where people think that they needn’t make much of an effort, and things can be salvaged by the re-recording. There are films that need music and films that don’t need that much music. This, unfortunately, is not understood by many of our filmmakers.]

Finally, I have a piece coming up tomorrow on — among other things — how “sound” (instead of background music) can be used to add “life” to a scene. It’s a wee bit technical, but hope you read it.

“His job is to make sure that he doesn’t re-state the obvious but help in making the implicit explicit.”

This is a great way to look at it. One example that comes to my mind immediately is a scene from There will be blood which, I think, has one of the best scores in the last decade. I am quoting from your review here “when a thousand out-of-sync violins bubble up and burst over to reveal the first visual of the film: a landscape. It appears to be just a shot of the earth and the hills beyond, but the ominousness of these strings could be hinting at the oil lying underneath – the oil that bubbles up and bursts over from stygian depths in the mine that Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis) is prospecting for silver.” I wonder who comes up with the idea of using this particular music for this shot – the writer or the director (in this case both PTA) or the music director. I don’t think details like these go into the script. But the sort of effect it has on us is incredible. This score, though does not make things explicit for us, does warn us of what is about to come.

Most of PTA’s movies have terrific scores and so do Fincher’s movies IMO. However, the degree of implicitness and explicitness varies for everyone I think. I, unlike you, am not particularly averse to Hans Zimmer’s composition for Nolan’s films. In the zero gravity sequence of Inception that you had mentioned in your review of X Men, I was indeed going ‘oh my god’ with the scene, but the score did add to the “goosebumpiness” (I don’t know if that’s a word!) of that scene. And I am a sucker for goosebumpy stuff. That is why the last scene in The Dark knight rises worked for me the first time. The music took me to a high that I did not care about the logic of what was happening. I am certainly not comparing this score to that of say There Will be Blood. I know for a fact that the music someone like PTA, Wes Anderson or Fincher employs in their movies are far more superior to what Nolan does. Its just that what Nolan does crosses my threshold of what works for me I guess.

I love the examples you have given from Guna and Moondram Pirai. You mentioned about the cultural aspect of re-recording – Raja using our temple sounds to create the divinity effect.

“But at least to an Indian audience, this score does what a score should do — communicate INNER emotions that an actor cannot.”

So it is kind of a good score for Tamil audience and not-so-good for global audience, isn’t it? This, to me, is one of the many reasons why Raja, with all due respect to his genius, did not get an international recognition as much as Rahman did.

“There are films that need music and films that don’t need that much music. This, unfortunately, is not understood by many of our filmmakers.”

Not just filmmakers, but also the audience, sometimes even some critics. I have read critics on the internet appreciating scores that, in my opinion, were too loud or distracting. People who read such stuff might tend to develop a liking towards such music. And the filmmakers also think this is what the audience want. A vicious circle indeed! As I write this, I wonder how much of my taste is influenced by writers like you 🙂 You should probably write a piece on this.

When you are free, do listen to this if you haven’t already. Quentin Tarantino shares his thoughts on There Will Be Blood, its music among others.

vijayakumar: “There will be blood” has a great score, yes, but it’s also because of the way the instruments used. We’ve heard violins as the background for nearly 100 years, but the way violins are used here is so… fresh. That’s another thing.

It’s usually the director and the music director. Any director who is of worth WILL have a say in what kind of score he wants, because he knows best what kind of mood he wants to summon up.

So it is kind of a good score for Tamil audience and not-so-good for global audience, isn’t it?

No, that’s not what I’m saying. The score HAS to be true to the situation, the ethos of the movie — and the ethos of “Guna”, what with its full-moon and Abhiramibhattar scenarios, is very Indian. Very Tamil, in fact. So Raja did what he had to do, which is to stay true to the film’s cultural cues.

What I’m saying is that a non-Indian may not get these cues, which is par for the course. But it would be wrong if Raja did something like “Ave Maria” just so the “world” can get this scene.

You could write a whole book on scoring for the movies. What I wrote in the comment isn’t even the tip of the iceberg. For instance, a score can also be used to infuse a sense of the mythic, along with a sense of “bringing things to a head.” The following stretch does it brilliantly.

“There are films that need music and films that don’t need that much music. This, unfortunately, is not understood by many of our filmmakers.”

Interestingly, I recently (re) watched Pushpak along with a friend. While the film has aged quite well, I somehow felt it was over-scored. Being a “silent” film, I suppose there was a need to use a lot more music. However, the need to emphasize every single emotion started to jar on me after a bit. Maybe a more understated approach (which was so evident in the acting and staging of scenes) would have elevated the film much more.

Brangan, that was timely , just when i was wondering , why nobody was mentioning sergio leone , wrt to the music in films.. Not discounting other great combos like hitchcock -hermann or spielberg-williams, i think that The ennio morricone-Leone combination is perhaps the greatest in history of cinema. Another eg. of what you are hinting at would be the climactic mexican standoff in good bad and ugly. It almost appears that leone was cutting the film to music rather than the other way around.Eventhough morricone gave great music to other directors as well like The untouchables or Joff’s The Mission(what a spectacular score man!), i think he worked best with Leone. His score for Once upon a time in America is a timeless masterpiece.

nsranganathan: That’s also a question of time and how tastes change. The music my have been right for that time, but today it may feel overdone. Once upon a time, John Williams’s lush symphonic orchestral scores were much lauded, but today, almost everything he does is viewed with a “time to retire” eye. His work with Spielberg, especially, has become embarrassing.

Nadinisi Naaygal had no background score but the sound design was good enough to thrill if not great. One may argue about how good or bad the film was, but to me the film worked without background score. Can such a film without background score be expected again and will it work?

The score in the sequence you have shared is excellent. Thanks! I have to admit that I have never seen any of the films, except maybe a couple Spielberg films, from the combos that MANK had mentioned. After watching this bit, now am going to watch Leone’s films starting with The Good, the bad and the ugly. Everyone raves about it! 🙂

Hi Mr Rangan, I discovered Sean Roldan very recently and he has piqued my interest in a way few Indian musicians or singers have in recent times, save maybe Sneha Khanwalkar and Tajdar Junaid. His voice is incredibly refreshing, reminiscent of Shahul Hamid, and cuts through the monotony of indistinguishable singers in Tamil cinema, and his inspirations are beautifully varied, from Tamil folk to country to blues to New Orleans brass. I was wondering if you had any thoughts on his music, including his independent stuff. It’s great to hear a band from Madras singing in Tamil and not in accented English, a problem that afflicts indie music across the country.

He could very well fall into a mould as Santhosh Narayanan has, as you mentioned in your review of Kadhalum Kadandhu Pogum, but I hope he doesn’t.